INFLUENCE OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON PERFORMANCE OF PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS TEACHERS
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Teacher professional learning is of increasing interest as a critical way to support the complex need of learning in order to succeed in the 21st century (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017). As argued by Oyedele and Chikwature (2016) that teacher’s professional development is imperative to school success and teacher job performance. On the other hand Heike (2017) pointed out that professional development help teachers to explore knowledge and skills that helps them to implement new roles, develop new instructional techniques, refine their practice and broaden their scope as educators and as the trainers. According to the same viewpoint, professional development has been a catalyst for improving teaching quality, according to Bicaj and Treska (2014).
Similarly, research indicates that teacher development programs are connected to competences that are linked to teachers’ overall performance (Nabila, 2016; Lyimo et al., 2017; Rekai, 2017). Therefore, every educational institution’s ability to produce high-quality teachers and students depends on the professional growth of its essential human resources. In order to acknowledge the significance of teacher professional development, professional development in education has been included into a worldwide process affecting the policies and practices of education in the majority of nations. For instance, the United States (US) has implemented one-time workshops as a professional development program to enhance the quality of instruction.
Teachers in the US meet once a week for a maximum of three hours to hear a lecture on a specific topic (Desimone and Garet, 2015). Less than 20% of US teachers received eight hours or less of professional development during the 2011–2012 school year, according to an analysis of the nationally representative schools and staffing survey (Department of Education in the United States, 2012 referenced in Desimone and Garet, 2015).
These statistics imply that US professional development providers are allocating more funds to guaranteeing teachers’ access to these kinds of events. The government of Nigeria, for instance, established a national policy on education that advocates that “teachers education shall continue to be given major emphasis in all educational planning and development.” The policy also states that the goal of teacher education is to produce highly motivated, conscientious, and efficient classroom teachers for all levels of national educational system activities. These policies are a step toward improving teachers’ job performance through professional development.
Like other developed and developing nations, Nigeria has developed a teacher education development and management strategy from 2007–2008 to 2010–2011, an education and training policy, and an education sector development plan to improve the professional development of teachers. These strategies have all offered a comprehensive, all-encompassing, and holistic program for attracting, obtaining, training, developing, and retaining qualified teachers and managers for all levels and aspects of the educational system.
In order to improve teachers’ professional growth, the Nigerian government has also set up a number of training facilities, ranging from universities to teachers colleges. Along with regulating the private sector’s ability to set up its own training facilities and schools, the government has also arranged seminars, training programs, and executive and general management courses for teachers’ professional growth. Based on government initiatives, a research conducted between 2011/12 and 2016/17 revealed that 17,737 secondary school teachers in Nigeria got in-service training aimed at improving secondary school performance (URT, 2016).
Teachers continue to perform poorly on the job, and the majority of students continue to do poorly despite the government’s initiative and the necessity of professional development in developing nations. For instance, Nabila (2016) found in his research that, despite receiving training, Indonesian teachers’ performance is probably below average because they lack professional and pedagogical competence. In Ghana, however, teachers’ poor performance was caused by a lack of regular in-service training (Hervie and Winful, 2018). On the same line of argument Oyedele and Chikwature (2016) found that the professional development for teachers in Zimbabwe has been criticized for its cost, often vaguely determined goals, and for the lack of data on resulting teacher and school improvement that characterizes many efforts.
In Nigeria, the poor performance of public secondary schools was observed in several years since the implementation of Secondary Education Development Programme (SEDP) which was from 2004-2009 phase one followed by the phase two from 2010-2015 for example the performance that was recorded from 2010 to 2016 shows a decrease in the number of students who score division 1-3 from 11.4% (2010) to 9.5% (2012) and there is an increase in the number of students who score in division IV from 38.9% (2010) to 49.6% (2012) (MOEVT, 2016).
Parallel to that the performance of students show that, out of 163,855 students who sat for their final examination in 2008, 26.7% scored in division I-III, 56.9% in division IV and (16.3) in division 0 whereas the performance of students in 2015 shows that out 354,885 students who sat for their final examinations, 25.4% scored in divisions I-III, 2.6% in division IV and 32% in division 0 (URT, 2016).
In addition despite all efforts by the government of Nigeria to fulfill its commitment by formulation of policy and education strategies, the current education system of teachers professional development does not satisfy the needs of the school performance, there are many policy items which were not implemented properly due to various factors such as inadequate funding and lack of proper implementation structure (URT, 2014).
Surprising of the initiative to enhance professional development and performance of teachers in secondary schools, little has been done in the research in analyzing the current influence of professional development and teachers job performance.
Even those few studies conducted each have come with conflicting argument and finding on relationship between professional developments and teachers job performance. For example Essien et al., (2016) found that there exists a small relationship between the frequency of teachers’ attendance at in-service training, seminars and workshops and their performance in terms of students’ academic performance in Nigeria. Similary Fejoh and Faniran (2016) findings showed that in-service training and staff development had insignificant combined effects but significant relative effects on workers’ optimal job productivity. They add that many teacher professional development initiatives appear ineffective in supporting changes in teacher practices and student learning.
On the other side of conflicting view of Sultan and Shafi (2014) from Indonesia have concluded that perceived teachers’ professional competence development predict teachers’ performance in terms of the students’ performance. Therefore it is not clear whether professional development tend to enhance teachers performance. As argued by Nabila (2016) that teachers who have attended the professional training are able to master various strategies or techniques in teaching and learning activities and master the foundations of education as contained within the competence of teachers. Given this argument there is a need to fill a gap by understanding the influence of professional development on performance of teachers of public secondary schools in Nigeria.